What goes around comes around. Back in the mid-80s, Jim Jarmusch was the last word in cinema chic, the coolest kid on the independent-movie block. Sixteen years and seven feature films later, Jarmusch stands as the last of a dying breed, defender of the purist faith. Jarmusch himself hasn't changed; his new film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is packed with the genre tricks and mordant humour that have characterised all his output. But after drifting, unloved and unappreciated, in a cinematic limbo for most of the 90s, the world has started, once again, seeing things Jarmusch's way.

His appearance only adds to the effect. Now 47, Jarmusch is practically identical to the Ohio-born, NYU-educated hipster who used his $12,000 film school scholarship money to make his first low-budget feature, Permanent Vacation. His second, Stranger Than Paradise, cost even less.

Jarmusch's trademark upswept silver hairdo is perfectly in place; keen eyes ever eager to communicate some heartfelt idea; slow voice measuring out the words. "One thing that flipped me out," he says, "when we made Stranger, we were very conscious that it was 1982. Though it was post punk, style was still very rock'n'roll. We lived in that milieu in New York, but we wanted characters who weren't connected with that. We wanted them to look more like guys you'd see at the racetrack. And then two years later everyone started dressing like that. It's funny how things happen."

Funny, indeed. Between 1984 and 1989, Jarmusch spearheaded the independent film movement, alongside Spike Lee and Michael Moore, with a trilogy of perfectly executed, thoroughly individual films. Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, and Mystery Train all shared a three-part structure, a wistful nostalgia for American pulp culture, and a downbeat, low-key narrative style borrowed from European and Japanese models. Jarmusch - in contrast to Lee's playful promotion of African-American consciousness, and Moore's self-help political radicalism - definitely occupied the high end of 80s alternative film-making, purveyor of an unflappable existential world-weariness that heralded the rise of a new wave of American auteurism.

These days, however, Jarmusch is reluctant to dwell on past glories. "I don't look back," he says. "Especially not at my own work. I don't know why. It's not healthy for me. Looking back, in work and in life, is something I'm hesitant to do. I try not to. It's funny, though, I'm transferring all my films to digital masters, for future DVD release, and it's really excruciating for me to watch them again. Down By Law, or whatever. I leave really depressed."

Jarmusch began the 90s with Night on Earth, his most ambitious film to date, boasting a pedigree cast that included Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands, and a tricky five-city schedule. Despite Night on Earth, however, Jarmusch's career stubbornly refused to take off - unlike Lee, who was gearing up to make Malcolm X for Columbia. "My films are hand-made in the garage," says Jarmusch, "so it takes me a little while to get them together. My friend Aki Kaurismaki calls me the world's slowest film director, after Kubrick. My rhythm is my rhythm, and - how can I say this? - I'm not ambitious, and I'm not career-orientated in that way. If I were, I'd make different kinds of films. I'm lucky and happy and want to keep making work, but I have no desire to be more prolific."

"But then I see someone like Aki, who works in the same way, or Claire Denis. They make films more often than I do. But I'm always telling them to slow down. I want them to be happy and healthy; they worry me because they get stressed out by working too much. I'm happy with my rhythm, slow as it may be. It's how I talk."

It... sure... is..., Jim... Jarmusch, however, has suffered in other ways. As Night on Earth ambled into cinemas worldwide, another force was gathering the momentum that was to end up eclipsing Jarmusch's gentle, cosmopolitan tale-spinning. Quentin Tarantino's early oeuvre trod the same paths as Jarmusch through cinematic self-reference, the poetry of street talk, and loose jigsaw-like structures - but also offered a souped-up pace and a massive injection of blood-letting.

Even more galling are the string of direct replays: the ghost of Elvis that appeared in True Romance popped up in Mystery Train, as does Four Rooms' hotel-bellboy linking device. Suddenly Jarmusch's slouching pulp fictions stopped seeming half as exciting when Tarantino's thrill-rides hit the screen.

"Quentin," mumbles Jarmusch, with characteristic generosity. "I like his films. But look, in the 70s I was into Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford and all that, and we used to argue with academics about it. No one was interested. You can't tell us that Jim Thompson is less important than Dante; you can't tell us that Gustav Mahler's music is more important than the Ramones. Now I find myself in the same argument, but on the other side, don't tell us Jim Thompson's more important than Dante, like don't buy into that hierarchical bullshit. We're arguing about the same things, but the polarity's reversed."

The mid-90s were Jarmusch's lowest ebb, a seemingly redundant film-maker tossed aside by fickle fashion. He kept himself busy appearing in friends' pet projects - a documentary on Sam Fuller's unfinished film Tigrero, a cameo in Wayne Wang's impro-happening Blue in the Face - and adding to Cigarettes and Coffee, his personal short film cycle. Then he embarked on Dead Man, a long mulled-over western - which resulted in a dangerous clash with Miramax chairman Harvey Weinstein.

Jarmusch protests his misfortune in an amiable, level-headed manner. "I felt that Miramax did not keep their word to me. I'm not bitter, and I did not expect Dead Man to be a commercial success. But I wanted it handled in a classy way. And it was handled, as one critic put it, with tongs by Miramax. I don't want to go into the whole thing, but Harvey Weinstein and I had problems with each other about him keeping his word to me. Because he bought a finished film; and then wanted me to change it. This was insulting to me and, ultimately, I felt punished - because I didn't do what he wanted, he didn't distribute the film in a classy way. But that's all business: I don't hate Harvey Weinstein. I just approach the world with a different code than he does."

If this sounds a little samurai, then it will be no surprise to learn that Jarmusch's longtime affection for Japanese culture in general, and cinema in particular, underpins Ghost Dog. Though it mixes in elements from hip hop movies and the mafia genre, Ghost Dog's central conceit is that Forest Whitaker - another Jarmusch pal - is a ghetto assassin who loves to read from the Hagakure, the 18th century collection of meditations on Bushido (the "code of the warrior").

Jarmusch's Japanese orientation stretches way back: at the outset of his career, he was plugging his interest in classical masters like Kurosawa and Ozu; Mystery Train gave Japanese star Masatoshi Nagase his first break in movies; and the same film saw the commencement of Jarmusch's financial relationship with JVC Entertainment, (which also injected funds into Night on Earth and Ghost Dog).

"I got to meet him a few weeks ago, in Tokyo," says Jarmusch, getting almost excited as he recalls an encounter with one of his idols. "Spent a whole evening talking to him. He's amazing, almost like a Japanese Sam Fuller; not the same aesthetic, but old school. At first he was very nice and polite about Ghost Dog; then he had a few drinks, and I asked him, tell me what you don't like, and he did. It was great; it was so interesting. He said, I like the atmosphere very much, it takes him too long to go and kill everyone. I would get him there, kill 'em all, I don't have time for all this. They want the tension of a more classical story. And then he had a long thing about people dying in the street. This is a bad place to die - where you die is as important as when and how you die. So I said, in American ghetto culture the street is not negative. He wants to make a new film too. I'm trying to get JVC to help him."

Here, you sense, is the answer to the riddle as to how Jarmusch has made it through the bad times - he likes people, and people like him. No other film-maker appears so dedicated to the art of simply hanging out, of making friends wherever he goes. Equally at ease with Hollywood veterans like Fuller ("I wish Sam was still alive," he says sadly), as music industry players like Wu Tang's RZA (who provided all of Ghost Dog's original soundtrack), Jarmusch has always surrounded himself with friends who double as collaborators, and vice versa. Roberto Benigni, Kaurismaki, Wim Wenders, Beatrice Dalle, Neil Young... these are just a few of the names in Jarmusch's gilt-edged Rolodex, a web of acquaintance that spans the globe.

His breakthrough movie, Stranger Than Paradise, culled its stars (John Lurie, Richard Edson) from Jarmusch's dabblings in New York's late-70s art-rock scene; Ghost Dog, his latest, is merely continuing the trend. Despite the fact that Jarmusch's work instantaneously became the pet subject of graduate theses, he's as keen as ever to point up the collaborative nature of his film-making.

"To me, the auteur thing is a lot of bullshit, because you collaborate on a film in every way, with everyone - even with whoever's stopping traffic. But I'm contradictory, because I'm a control freak to the point that I want to know every prop, every ashtray, every colour, everything that's in the set. But at the same time I'm collaborating with other people, who are helping me find those things. I would like to work in a more free way, but I don't have that luxury because I don't have that kind of budget."

If nothing else, Jarmusch's long run demonstrates that you get what you give, that the love you take is equal to the love you make, that - indeed - what goes around comes around. And it's just as well he's content with his lot. "I don't want to be mainstream," he says. "I like being in the margins. I'm happy where I exist. The things that inspire me I find in the margins. I'm not consciously trying to be marginal, it's just where I end up and where I live. There's a gift in there for me and I'm happy to have that gift."